Of the country's 270 Covid-19 cases to date, 51 remain active and 219 have been discharged from hospitals. The 51 include 12 patients who relapsed.

Vietnam began buying Covid-19 medicines for a possible 10,000 infections, but Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has called a halt to this, the Government Office announced Thursday.

But localities need to have contingency stocks, the PM said. He noted that with 270 confirmed cases out of an almost 100 million population, Vietnam is among the countries with the lowest infection rates.

A 16-year old girl in the northern province of Ha Giang was discharged on Thursday.

On the same day "patient 92", a 21-year-old Vietnamese student who had returned from France, relapsed 15 days after being discharged from Ho Chi Minh City's Cu Chi field hospital. The fourth relapse in HCMC took the national count to 12.

Most of the 51 patients being treated are in stable condition, with 15 of them testing negative for the virus at least once.

Over 47,000 people are in quarantine, 272 in hospitals, over 12,000 at quarantine facilities and the rest at home.

The Ministry of Health has instructed medical facilities to perform more check-ups at home or through phone or the Internet.

The pandemic has spread to 210 countries and territories so far, claiming over 233,700 lives.